Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work

by Craig Gent

Overview

How technologies of organization are redrawing the lines of class struggle

Across the world, algorithms are changing the nature of work. Nowhere is this clearer than in the logistics and distribution sectors, where workers are instructed, tracked and monitored by increasingly dystopian management technologies.

In Cyberboss, Craig Gent takes us into workplaces where algorithms rule to excavate the politics behind the newest form of managerial power. Combining worker testimony and original research on companies such as Amazon, Uber, and Deliveroo, the cutting edge of algorithmic management technology, this book reveals the sometimes unexpected effects these new techniques have on work, workers and managers. Gent advances an alternative politics of resistance in the face of digital control.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781839768552
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	08/27/2024
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.26(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

Craig Gent is a writer, editor and researcher. He is a director at Novara Media, where he has worked for over ten years. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Warwick, and his work has been published in Jacobin, Vice and the Independent.

Table of Contents

1. The Stakes
2. Algorithmic Work
3. Management
4. Technological Politics
5. Algorithmic Management
6. Refusal and Resistance
7. Epilogue

Acknowledgements
Notes

Editorial Reviews

"Craig Gent has given working people a great gift with this book. In a time of near-worship of the disembodied algorithm, he has illuminated the various ways that "cyberbosses" control - and more importantly, fail to control - today's workers. He cuts the algorithm down to size, reminding us that the most impenetrable tech is made by humans, and can be broken by humans as well. An absolutely indispensable read for anyone organizing, working, or indeed just trying to survive in the 21st century."
—Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

"Algorithms and AIs may or may not take our jobs, but they are now definitely directing and disciplining our work. This is the message of Craig Gent's highly readable, urgently argued and carefully researched study of the digital automation of management, a vital book for labour activists, cyber-scholars, and all those fighting high-tech capitalisms increasingly inhuman power."
—Nick Dyer Witheford, author of Cyber-Marx and Cyber-Proletariat, and, with Alessendra Mularoni, of The Cybernetic Circulation Complex: Big Tech and Planetary Crisis

"Algorithmic management is a growing reality of the modern workplace. Craig Gent provides an important investigation into the power and politics that drive it, and how workers can challenge the ways it's used against them."
—Paris Marx, author of Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation

"Left to its own devices, automation will not "steal our jobs" - at least not the very worst of them. Rather, it will increasingly consign humans to precarious drudgery while it takes over the role of manager. Craig Gent enriches a growing literature that punctures tech boosterism on both the left and the right by developing a political analysis of algorithmic management that makes it fundamentally into a question of power - within the workplace, of course, but above all over machines and our own lives."
—Rodrigo Nunes, University of Essex, author of Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organisation

From the Publisher